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Telefónica Boosts Cloud Capabilities

Telefónica has announced that it has signed a strategic partnership with Joyent, a provider of cloud services and technologies. The partnership sees Telefónica making a strategic equity investment in Joyent that, in turn, gives it access to the latest Joyent technologies and software for the deployment of high performance and cost efficient cloud services.

Cloud-based services are a key focus area for Telefónica’s new Digital unit, and Joyent’s technology expertise will help Telefónica enhance its product offering, particularly for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Small Office Home Office (SoHo) customers. The partnership combines Telefónica’s global scale and infrastructure with the cloud architecture developed by Joyent.

Unlike other cloud technology providers, Joyent has developed its entire cloud software stack from scratch, resulting in significant cost reduction and efficiency, an easy to operate architecture and exceptional operational performance. The company has proven experience in defining, exploiting, commercialising and operating a cloud business with over 12,000 public cloud customers in the US.

“This investment is further proof of our ambition in the area of cloud services and our strategy of working with the most innovative start-ups,” said Matthew Key, Chairman & CEO, Telefónica Digital. “Joyent’s technology fits perfectly with our in-house developed technologies and our cloud services model and enables us to provide more competitive offerings to a broader range of customer segments.”

“This strategic partnership and funding will enable us to expand our product offering to more regions and to evolve our products, taking advantage of the service provider vision brought by Telefonica” said David Young, founder and CEO of Joyent.

Tracy Isacke led the investment in Joyent for Telefónica Ventures, a division of Telefónica Digital, with offices in Silicon Valley, London, Madrid and Israel. This is the second investment since Telefonica Digital was created in September 2011.

Telefónica Digital has been formed to lead Telefónica’s growth strategy in the new digital world. Through a combination of research and development, partnership, investment and acquisition it will bring innovative products and services to market that allow it to drive continued growth in the core telecommunications market, as well as taking a leading role in new digital services such as entertainment, financial services, M2M, cloud computing and eHealth.